There exist regional collaboration systems that enable multiple medical institutions within a prescribed region to share medical information (e.g., medical records and radiograph interpretation reports of patients, etc.) managed and stored by each medical institution. The regional collaboration system provides a datacenter to which multiple medical institutions in a region can refer, and this datacenter stores the location (i.e., the medical institution) of each item of medical information as management information. Based on this management information, medical institutions in the region acquire medical information created by other medical institutions from those medical institutions via a network. In this way, in a regional collaboration system, when multiple items of medical information are distributed and managed across each medical institution, it is possible for multiple medical institutions in the region to collaborate by sharing medical information via a network.
On the other hand, the multiple medical institutions in the region may not necessarily have the same business hours. Therefore, the operating times of the servers managing the medical information may differ for each medical institution. As a result, during the non-operating time of a server, it is difficult for another medical institution to use the medical information stored in that server. Anticipating these non-operating times, there are methods of preliminarily storing copies of the medical information stored in each server in each medical institution, allowing the copies of the medical information to be referred to in the operating hours. However, enormous storage areas would be required for each medical institution in the region to store all of the copies of the medical information stored in all of the medical institutions. In particular, because the number of items of medical information stored in the medical institutions in a region increases exponentially as the number of medical institutions increases, it is extremely difficult to store copies of all medical information in each medical institution.